From
skateboards to nanotechnology —
a UAlbany student’s journey to his future

Jonathan
Rullan

When he arrived at UAlbany at age 17, Jonathan
Rullan was “still influenced by skateboarding
and all of the adolescent style that came with
it: big jeans, tongue piercing, bleached hair.”
In the six years since, he has traded in his
skateboard, piercing, and bleach for an atomic
force microscope (AFM), a scanning electron
microscope (SEM) – and a future in the nanotechnology
field.

Now 24, the New York City native “really had
no idea what I wanted to be” when he enrolled
in 1998. “All I knew was that I wanted to do
something in science, and when I was trying
to think what I could do with science, I really
wasn’t sure. So I took one step at a time, taking
the courses I liked.”

Jonathan became interested in nanotechnology
– the science of manipulating matter on the
atomic scale – and the College of Nanoscale
Science and Engineering (CNSE) “before the school
was even up and running. In my senior year,
doing independent research at Albany NanoTech,
I was exposed to something I didn’t even know
existed and decided to pursue it.”

After earning his B.S. in physics in 2002,
Jonathan studied in UAlbany’s physics graduate
program for about a year and half. He “switched
over to CNSE” last spring. Now working toward
his master’s in nanoscience and nanoengineering,
he is considering the idea of earning a doctorate
in the same field. “I’m studying the surface
morphology of copper interconnect wires as a
function of time and heat. It’s important to
understand the stresses induced on a copper
wire – all the different material being applied
on top of the copper, which requires different
heat processes.”

Left to
right: Assistant Professor of Nanoscale
Science and Engineering Kathleen Dunn, Jonathan
Rullan, and graduate student Susan Huang,
who also does research at CNSE.

Jonathan works closely with his faculty mentor,
Assistant Professor of Nanoscale Science and
Engineering Kathleen Dunn. “She lets me do work
I’m interested in, but leads me in the right
direction. I look up to her.”

“Mentoring is a vital part of the faculty-student
relationship,” says Professor Dunn. “Classroom
teaching can only go so far; most students learn
better from watching and doing.”

The mentoring relationship, she adds, benefits
faculty, too: “It keeps us young. The students
are a constant source of new energy and new
ideas that catalyze our own research interests.
It’s very fulfilling to watch the evolution
of a student as we nurture his creativity and
equip him with the critical analysis skills
required to tackle the problems presented to
him. In Jon’s case, particularly, it has been
rewarding to see him learn to focus his tremendous
energy and to see him develop the analytical
skills to complement his innate enthusiasm and
abilities.”